Thursday, November 12, 2015

Saints' Insides, Part 1

Milton wrote his great epic, so
he said, to “assert th’eternal Providence / And justify the ways of God to
man.”What it says about my theology,
psychology, or spirituality I do not know, but for me the problem of theodicy
has never been a particularly compelling one.Moreover (though this is a separate issue), I am not convinced that attempting
to assert God’s care for men, or to defend his actions in general, is a
particularly fruitful way of proceeding for a Christian literary artist.What comes off as majestic in painting or
sculpture is apt on the page to seem overbearing, so that for every cool-headed
Stanley Fish there is a legion of underdistinguished and underdistinguishing
Keatses claiming Milton for the devil’s party.

Much more helpful, I think—if
we are to talk about evangelization through art—than the image of a good God is
the image of the good man—or it would be, could be, if it were ever done well—for
two reasons.On the one hand, it is
broadly helpful (as Aristotle says) to begin not with things that are best
known in themselves, but things best known to us.God, in His simplicity, must be much better
integrated (if I may speak so without heresy) than even the simplest of the
saints; but we, fools that we are, have a better chance of understanding the saint
than of understanding God.

The second reason is related to
and perhaps an elaboration of the first.The literary saint can evangelize in a way that portraits of God cannot,
because in comprehending the saint the emotions as well as the intellect come
into play.God, though He is Love, is
Love in such a peculiar way as to make our attempts at explaining Him either
saccharine or paradoxical; and the language of paradox is suited at best for
poetry.I am not convinced that a
metaphysical conceit or an objective correlative is much good for getting at
God either; but they seem rather more plausible candidates, belonging as they
do to the more pictoral or even musical side of art, than an extended narrative
with or without an argument-driven plot.Impressionism and philosophy are the best we are likely to do in coming
to grips with God in art; open-faced philosophy has no place in literature, and
impressionism is unsatisfying over an epic or novelistic expanse.

Dostoyevsky of
course spoils my point by using both.But
in The Brother Karamazov (to take one
well-known example) the characters are so strongly developed that he can get
away with it.

Rather than impressionism or
philosophizing, the novel calls for activity on the part of the central
characters, and most importantly the interior activity of the most central
character of all.The protagonist of a
modern novel or drama is generally supposed to be quite active in this
way—“conflicted” is one word sometimes used, approvingly or not.It is generally supposed that the more
conflicted a character is, the more interesting he or she will be; if a central
character has no great moral conflict, we consider the work in which they
appear to be of less artistic significance.This is why Nolan’s Batman series and Inception are generally given greater respect than, say, anything
Indiana Jones or Star Wars: all the films are obviously designed to entertain,
and to entertain the masses; but only some of them pretend to do more—and they
pretend to more in no small part by offering central characters who are more
“interesting” than Jones or Luke Skywalker.

Thus, it seems that, though the
saint—or, since so many examples come from the realm of the secular, the Hero
with a capital H—may be more understandable than God, he is not necessarily
more respectable.Indeed, he is hardly
more likeable; for the same people who take exception to God’s judgments and
His tendency to recline in eternal bliss also find the Hero’s moral
self-assuredness and invulnerability to temptation galling.We do not like
Aeneas; and we only find Luke and Indiana Jones tolerable because they are
rogues as well as Heroes.

My question then—my
problem, as a literary artist—is whether and how it is possible to create a
Hero, and indeed a Saint, who is neither a rogue, nor a naïve, nor a bore.

Aye. Alexandra Petri makes a similar point about the difficulty with working with the Superman character: see https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/06/20/man-of-steel-have-we-outgrown-superman/.